Can TOD help metro station ridership ‘early recovery’ from COVID-19? An empirical evidence from Nanjing

Ming Yin, Yuqi Fan and Yu Wang

Journal of Transport Geography, 2025, vol. 123, issue C

Abstract: TOD-ness, defined as the extent to which the existing conditions of TOD sites align with established TOD standards, has been shown in previous studies to have a significant correlation with metro station ridership. This paper utilizes the LightGBM model to investigate the relationship between TOD-ness and the “early recovery” of metro station ridership following the lifting of COVID-19 control measures. The study findings show: (1) At the line level, metro ridership in Nanjing has significantly rebounded following the lifting of COVID-19 control measures, particularly for non-commuting and weekend travel. At the station level, external transport hubs and major city center stations experienced the most notable recovery in ridership, while secondary urban center stations saw relatively higher increases in weekend ridership. (2) In terms of TOD-ness typology, stations with higher overall indicators and node indicators exhibited a greater number of ridership recoveries. (3) Regarding the relative importance of different indicators, factors related to place and design—such as functional mix, road network density, POI density of residences, and pedestrian shed ratio—are the more important drivers of ridership recovery for both commuting and non-commuting purposes. However, non-commuting ridership recovery is more influenced by station location and functional diversity, whereas commuting ridership recovery is more closely associated with ease of access.

Keywords: TOD-ness; Metro ridership; Resilience of ridership; Gradient boosting decision tree; Shapley additive explanations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0966692324003168

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jotrge:v:123:y:2025:i:c:s0966692324003168

DOI: 10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2024.104107

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Transport Geography is currently edited by Frank Witlox

More articles in Journal of Transport Geography from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().